Bill Kruetzmann

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For The End of the Road, filmmaker Brent Meeske took a roving handheld camera on tour with The Grateful Dead, roaming the parking lots and campgrounds that made up the Deadhead scene during what wound up being the last three months of Jerry Garcia's life. In attempting to present the scene as realistically as possible, he foregoes narration and tries to show how the Deadhead scene was approaching an end even before Garcia's 1995 death made it official.

The shots of, and interviews with, the Deadheads are completely random for the first ten or fifteen minutes, and are nothing new to anyone who has ever been to a Dead show or had Deadhead friends. We see requisite shots of underweight tripsters with creative dentistry clad in dirty jeans and loose-fitting smocks and smoking weed and holding signs saying "I Need a Miracle" (Deadhead code for "I need a ticket"). A girl with "Dose Me" written on her forehead appears over and over again in montages until you want to scream at the screen, "For God's sake, someone dose her already!"